Field
In one aspect, the following relates to microprocessor architecture, and in a more particular aspect, to implementations of disclosed features.
Related Art
An architecture of a microprocessor pertains to a set of instructions that can be handled by the microprocessor, and what these instructions cause the microprocessor to do. Architectures of microprocessors can be categorized according to a variety of characteristics. One major characteristic is whether the instruction set is considered “complex” or of “reduced complexity”. Traditionally, the terms Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) and Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) respectively were used to refer to such architectures. Now, many modern processor architectures have characteristics that were traditionally associated with only CISC or RISC architectures. In practicality, a major distinction of meaning between RISC and CISC architecture is whether arithmetic instructions perform memory operations.
Processor architectures can be characterized according to a variety of parameters. One parameter is a number of bits used to address memory, a number of bits available in general purpose registers, and/or a number of bits used to represent instructions. Some architectures may not use the same number of bits for all of these purposes. For example, some processors may use a different number of bits for representing instructions than for a number of bits used to address memory, or a memory word size. In general, however, a number of bits used for all these purposes has increased throughout the years on current-generation processors (even though a wide range of processor architectures continues to exist.) For example, some processor architectures originally had 4 or 8 bit memory word sizes, and have gradually increased to 16-bit, 32-bit, and now 64-bit addressing. A transition from 32-bit to 64-bit has been comparatively recent on a variety of different architectures.